Though some of the mobility components can leverage specific features of already existing applications and infrastructure but it imposes new requirements on the organizations existing IT infrastructure. Specific solutions by vendors that have mobile enablement can also be retrofitted to support mobility. However, using multiple vendor products or specific solutions just to mobile enable individual applications or suites will give rise to silos which will not easily integrate, giving rise to maintenance problems and cost concerns.
Enabling mobility within an organization brings with it additional functionalities that must be supported by IT including device management and service/application provisioning. Interactions with specific mobility products like BES to manage/enable mobile devices would need to be supported. Mobile application lifecycle management, device life cycle management, and so on, fall within the category of specific mobility related needs.
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A dedicated MEAP to enable and support mobility takes into account all the requirements mentioned earlier. It will be able to interface with the existing middleware and backend systems to enable data and applications on mobile devices. The MEAP will also make available a set of common features and services that can be leveraged by multiple applications to perform common operations.
The best approach for any organization while implementing a given solution is to first identify its own needs without any specific market offering in mind. Having identified needs, it is much easier to then analyze the extent to which these needs are readily fulfilled by the major players in the market.
The Strategic Consulting Group at Endeavour uses a similar approach and identifies the prime needs of a MEAP without considering any specific MEAP offering. After having done that they help organisations benchmark their needs against specific MEAPs in the market.
Since the MEAP market is maturing it may make sense for organizations to allow the best practices to emerge while at the same time build what it needs. There is no single product that can fulfill all MEAP requirements of a large organization.
1. The platforms have limited capability to mobile enable existing applications:
a. SAP NetWeaver and Sybase Unwired platforms can mobile enable a limited set of SAP-based applications. However, they would be limited mostly to the workflows domain.
b. Antenna Dexterra platform can mobile enable existing applications if mobile clients are written for the AMP platform.
c. In each case, the offerings require a vendor runtime to reside and execute on the device, which severely limits the capabilities that applications can have. Primarily, the architecture is such that the development environment provided by these offerings, generates a pseudo-code and the runtime component is required to interpret the pseudo-code and help run the application. Therefore, application performance is not as good as compared to an application written in native code. Apart from the same, there is a limitation in such architectures where the device capabilities cannot be leveraged beyond an extent.
2. Selecting Sap NetWeaver, Sybase Unwired, or Antenna Dexterra would also constrain new applications development efforts at the organization to the platform imposed by the respective vendors. In addition, if a particular feature of an OS is not supported by a platform, an application cannot be developed even if a requirement arises:
3. On the device management front, MobileIron is more capable than the other offerings. However, it is focused on Device Management only. Other platforms have a more limited set of functionalities. However, MobileIron has no enterprise application integration or support capabilities.
The Nuances of Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP)
Endeavour is a specialist Mobility company since 2002. Endeavour has been providing strategic consulting and mobile application development services for Mobile enabling businesses in the Manufacturing, Media, Print, Healthcare, Consumer solutions, Telecom and Business Intelligence verticals. Endeavour develops mobile solutions on all mobile platforms in the market today, including, RIM, Apple, Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, micro Linux, Brew. Endeavour is based out of Austin, Texas, Bangalore India and London, UK. Please visit us at http://www.techendeavour.com
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